ritualism or
formalism of any kind,--in short, he did not believe in a church,
for a church, however broad and liberal, is, after all, an
institution, and no one man, however great, can support an
institution. A very great soul--and Emerson was a great soul--may
carry a following through life and long after death, but that
following is not a church, not an institution, not a living
organized body, until forms, conventions, and traditions make it
so; its vitalizing element may be the soul of its founder, but the
framework of the structure, the skeleton, is made up of the more
or less rigid conventions which are the results of natural and
logical selection.

The ritual of Rome, the service of England, the dry formalism of
Calvinism, the slender structure of Unitarianism were all equally
repugnant to Emerson; he could not stretch himself in their
fetters; he was not at ease in any priestly garment. Born a
prophet, he could not become a priest. By nature a teacher and
preacher, he never could submit to those restrictions which go so
far to make preaching effective. He taught the lesson of the ages,
but he mistook it for his own. He belonged to humanity, but he
detached himself. He was a leader, but would acknowledge no
discipline. Men cried out to him, but he wandered apart. He was an
intellectual anarchist of rare and lovely type; few sweeter souls
ever lived, but he defied order.

Not that Emerson would have been any better if he had submitted to
the discipline of some church; he did what he felt impelled to do,
and left the world a precious legacy of ideas, of brilliant,
beautiful thoughts; but thoughts which are brilliant and beautiful
as the stars are, scattered jewels against the background of night
with no visible connection. Is it not possible that the gracious
discipline of an environment more conventional might have reduced
these thoughts to some sort of order, brought the stars into
constellations, and left suggestions for the ordering of life that
would be of greater force and more permanent value?

His wife relates that one day he was reading an old sermon in the
little room in the Follen mansion, when he stopped, and said,
"The passage which I have just read I do not believe, but it was
wrongly placed."

The circumstance illustrates the openness and frankness of his
mind, but it is also a commentary on the want of system in his
intellectual processes. His habit through life was to jot down
thoughts as